AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites
By a Broken Rites researcher (article updated 2 February 2014)
Broken Rites is researching Brother “George” Taylor, who was a child-molester in the Catholic order of De La Salle Brothers in Australia. Brother George was finally brought to justice at the age of 79 when a former pupil, aged nearly 40, managed to persuade the New South Wales police to investigate Brother George regarding incidents that had occurred three decades earlier when the boy was eleven. Since then, other victims of Brother George have contacted Broken Rites, the latest being in February 2014..
Broken Rites has ascertained that Albert Matthew Taylor (alias Brother “George”) was born in Melbourne on 1 July 1916 in a family of five children.
By the time he reached the age of 14 (in 1930), the world had been hit by the Great Depression, creating massive unemployment in Australia. Albert Matthew Taylor solved this problem by becoming a trainee in the De La Salle religious order. After some “religious” training and some on-the-job teacher training, he emerged by the age of 18 as a fully-fledged De La Salle Brother, working as a teacher in De La Salle schools. He donned the Brothers’ black smock and clerical collar, which signified to the Catholic community that he was supposedly committed to a life-time of celibacy, chastity and holiness, supposedly making him a safe person to mind Catholic children.
In line with the De La Salle custom, he adopted a new forename, becoming known to generations of Australian Catholic schoolboys as “Brother George”. In those years, schoolboys did not know the surnames of De La Salle Brothers — and in those years even a Brother’s first name was an alias. This eventually would make it difficult for victims of “Brother George” to tell the police the real name of their offender.
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